Anim8or Community

I've posted an update to the latest preview called v0.97b.  It's dated June 1, 2008 and adds:

1. a few more texture modes to the ART renderer,

2. some new ASL script functions,

3. multi-threaded rendering (no, it doesn't use more threads to render faster, it uses one to render and one for the GUI to make Anim8or more responsive when rendering and to keep Vista from thinking that Anim8or is locked up.  Multiple threads for faster rendeing will come later.)  Please test the multi-threaded mode (use the Render->Multithreaded command to enable it) and let me know about any problems.

4. Some v0.97 bugs have been fixed.

Read the update on the v0.97 Preview page for details http://www.anim8or.com/download/preview/index.html

Steve

"Only" once a month!  craksy, have you ever tried to publish something like this on a schedule?  It's a lot of work!

Thanks, Dotan8.  Another great issue.

The numbers in red are derivatives of the spline in the forward and backwards directions at that knot.

I am adding multithreading but not for rendering multiple frames simultaneously or to speed up a single frame.  That would be a large amount of work.  The reason I'm doing it is to make Anim8or more Vista friendly.  Vista kills programs that don't respond to messgaes in 10 seconds or so which doesn't let you render anything interesting.  I'll use one thread to process messages and one to render.

Yes, the total reflectged energy of a material can be greater than the incoming energy.  That's true forall three renders: scanline, OpenGL and the ART Ray Tracer.

I have made a subtile change in the way the environment reflection materials work for the latter two so that they aren't additive but this hasn't been reflected in the scanline renderer yet - so 100% environment textures are added to the materials color.  I will be changing it to a lrp soon.  This change is a move in the direction of energy conservation.

Note that without true radiance calculations in the shader it can be difficult to get the look that you want when energy is conserved.  Hilights can easily be tooy dim.

Yeah, multithreading would really speed up ray tracing.  Unfortunately it's not that simple to do it correctly in general.  Speeding up the rendering of a single frame would require that I completely rewrite the way that all of the random number generators work for the samplers.  It might be possible to do two frames in parallel, however, but that would use twice as much memory.

Polly is an OpenGL base game engine that has direct Anim8or support.  In the near future the source will be available under to GPL license.  Written by Nicolaas.  http://www.irio.co.uk/index.php?page=polly

I haven't had time to try it yet so if you do let us know!